Pulseaudio volumes not making sense

Soukyuu · 2015-01-25 19:21:17

So I have configured pulseaudio following the wiki and on one of my PCs it works fine (including skype).
On my other one (the C2D, see sig), as soon as any audio program is started, all volume setting are reset to an arbitary "default" value.

While there are no side-effects on the output side, for the input side, that means it sets the mic boost to 0 and capture level to max - the mic input is totally overdriven and distorted.
Changing settings in alsamixer doesn't do anything - they are reset again as well

How can I make it honor the volume levels set in alsamixer? Sound card is a Realtek ALC268 (visible as Intel HD Audio Device in lspci)

I'm seeing two capture sources in alsa mixer, but only the one that is "capture" (not "capture1")
Another weirdness is that increasing the capture level in KDE/KMixer beyond 50% shows the slider go up and when you let go, it starts to slowly sink by itself back to 50%

Using pavucontrol, the Internal Microphone has two states: its level is either 100% when the volume sliders are between 0-100 and 0% when it goes over 100%
The external microphone scales from 0-100% when the slider is in the range of 0-23%. Anything beyond just makes a loud click and the capture is muted.

I have tried changing the flat volume setting as described here, no change in behavior.
I have also tried running alsactl store as root to save my current alsamixer settings as default, but somehow they get overridden anyway.

Any ideas what might be going wrong with this sound card? Which info should I provide?
I am appalled that getting sound to work on linux is such an ordeal...

edit: all in all, if pulseaudio would leave the volumes I have set in alsamixer alone, everything would be fine, except for the internal mic, that is not picking up any sound it seems.

Last edited by Soukyuu (2015-01-25 19:32:53)

Soukyuu · 2015-02-11 22:42:05

So... any info I can provide for anyone to help me with this?

V1del · 2015-02-12 07:55:48

1. There is a bug in orc which can cause this, there's a patch against it and pulseaudio which will land with 6.0 which should be soonish - see here as well https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=742271

2. Sometimes alsa reports wrong DB information you can try to set

 module-udev-detect ignore_dB=1

in your default.pa and see if that fixes it.

3. Regarding leaving alone the alsamixer level - you can do this by disabling udev-detect and loading module alsa-card and/or alsa-sink and defining the controls that should be controlled with the 'control=' parameter - also read this for the reason it currently works as it does http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Softwar … MyVolumes/

Arch Linux

#1 2015-01-25 19:21:17

Pulseaudio volumes not making sense

#2 2015-02-11 22:42:05

Re: Pulseaudio volumes not making sense

#3 2015-02-12 07:55:48

Re: Pulseaudio volumes not making sense

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